New Guilty Pleasure: Naked and Afraid

The Discovery Channel is now exposing us to a whole new level to the reality/survival shows: dropping people off completely butt-arse naked.

I caught this marathon over the weekend since the weather was crap and the g/f was out of town. At first I thought it was the most moronic thing I could think of, a new low in reality programming to rival Honey Boo-Boo. But then I thought about it a bit...

While the participants (a man and a woman) do get to bring one piece of survival equipment with them (most popular one seems to be the machete), that and the burlap bag it comes in is all they have. How truly and royally screwed are you to be dropped off somewhere butt-arse naked with only one piece of survival gear?

Knowing that there's a camera crew there recording their daytime activities takes some of the danger out of it although there is plenty left:

1. A member of one of the advanced scouting teams got bit by a Fer-de-Lance, had to be air-lifted back to the hospital, by the time they got the anti-venom in him enough skin and tissue had necrotized that you could see some of his toe bones through the hole in the side of his foot :shudder:

2. One of the contestants contracted a serious disease and faced 6 months to a year of physical therapy before she can walk without assistance.

With all that said, this is reality tv so there are things that go on behind the scenes we don't see (one guy "hurt" his foot, when in reality he broke three toes and did the entire 3-week event like that -the show portrayed him more as being lazy and never acknowledged the broken toes-, meanwhile one gal was given an IV drip and baby food to pull her through some food poisoning she got from eating a turtle -the IV drip nor the baby food were ever mentioned on the show), so take it for what it's worth.

It's not as addictive to me as Bar Rescue, but it's interesting.